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Maven 3.0-alpha-3 Released!

For those you [following][1] [along][2] with our story on improving Maven, you’ll happy to know that we have made a significant step today with the release of [Maven 3.0-alpha-3][download]. Though we are marking this as an alpha release, we are largely feature complete for Maven 3.0 and consider this to be the best version of Maven that has ever existed.

Our primary goals with Maven 3.0 are:

1) Provide a drop-in replacement for Maven 2.x. You should not have to change your POMs, or rewrite plugins. Your projects should just work.

2) Provide a more reliable, stable and performant Maven. We have tried to make Maven 3.x faster and we’ve succeeded for any of the projects that we’ve tested. We have a performance framework in place to make sure we don’t regress. We are measuring network I/O, disk I/O, CPU utilization and memory usage. We also have a massive number of integration tests to make sure the behaviour remains consistent and compatible as we progress. We simply aren’t going to go backward at this point.

3) Synchronize the [M2Eclipse][m2e] releases with Maven 3.x so that we can immediately push fixes from Maven 3.x into M2Eclipse. For a long time M2Eclipse was out of sync with Maven trunk and created a great number of problems. We are now completely in sync and within hours of making changes in Maven 3.x they make it into the CI builds of M2Eclipse.

4) Provide an easy way to embed Maven as a library. I think we’ve really proven this with M2Eclipse but [Sonatype][sonatype] has two other efforts taking place. The first is to embed Maven 3.0 into [Hudson][hudson] and the second is to embed Maven 3.0 into [Nexus][nexus]. The APIs that we are creating not being final is largely why we are still releasing alphas. From a CLI perspective we’re pretty much done, from an embedding perspective we still have some work to do.

4) Provide a solid base for extensions and reuse. There are three efforts going on here which are pushing the boundaries of Maven 3.x:

* [Tycho][tycho]: Which is Sonatype’s toolchain for building OSGi bundles and Eclipse plugins & RCP applications. The changes that we made in Maven 3.x to accommodate the embedding of an OSGi runtime (in our case Equinox) was non-trivial. We’ve been working on this for over a year and we have what we believe to be the best hybridization of Maven and OSGi technologies. Maven was stretched, and pushed and pulled to get all of this to work. I believe the current adoption of Tycho by the [Tigerstripe][tigerstripe] at [Eclipse.org][eclipse] is a sign of things to come. Users want to build OSGi bundles and Eclipse plugins using real OSGi technologies with Maven and we have delivered.

* Polyglot Maven: This is our attempt to create a great degree of flexibility in the core of Maven 3.x. We provide the ability to easily pull POM information from any data source and allow DSLs access to core functionality in Maven to create new tools using Maven 3.x. The development of Polyglot Maven has sparked a lot of interest and we hope to make public release in the next month.

* Maven Shell: An attempt to provide an embedded form of Maven for typical CLI users. We are planning to
– Provide more intelligent caching implementation to make builds faster. Already we are seeing 100-200% speed increases over using the standard CLI (which itself is already faster then Maven 2.x).
– Integrate a powerful form of the Make-like reactor that is built into Maven 3.x to make working in the shell extremely efficient.
– Integrate an advanced form of Archetype so that we can provide a power scaffolding framework for general application development.

We are not forgetting about documentation either. All the work that has been done in Maven 3.x is currently being documented in Maven: The Definitive Guide and we will be complete when Maven 3.0 goes GA. We also have some pretty cool site generation tools that I am using to create a new Maven 3.0 site which is also be ready in time for the final release.

For now, Benjamin and I are preparing for any feedback from users who want to try the alpha-3 release and we’ll be standing by to apply patches and make fixes for anything that users find — just like we have for the last year. This is part of Sonatype’s ongoing committment to help sustain the Maven ecosystem to provide the support, tooling, and documentation to help get new users and developers involved.